Voprosy Jazykoznanija

It is generally acknowledged that the phonetic patterns of the Russian literary language are not universal and do not cover the entire vocabulary. Groups of words distinguished for various reasons, in many cases, do not obey the general rules of the sound system, but rather specific patterns that set these groups against both the system as a whole and each other. Traditionally, such groups of words are called pronunciational subsystems and are distinguished based on their lexical, grammatical, and statistical features (subsystem of loanwords, service words, rare words, etc.). The article attempts a description of the pronunciational subsystems of the Russian literary language based on purely phonetic criteria. In the proposed model, all the facts of the sound system of the Russian literary language are grouped into two subsystems — phonetic (there is a synchronous phonetic law that is not “tied” to specific words or morphemes, the realization of a phoneme in a certain phonetic position unambiguously predicts the appearance of a specific sound) and orthoepic (combines various cases of orthoepic variation, which are given in a list and do not allow to determine pronunciation of words or morphemes based on their spelling). Phonetic patterns are universal, they work in any words and morphemes. Orthoepic phenomena can be divided, depending on lexical or grammatical indicators, into groups of words and parts of words united by common pronounciation features — loan words, function words, proper names, the first bases of compounds and abbreviated compounds, etc. In contrast to the traditional approach, these groups of words are not recognized in the proposed model as pronouncing subsystems.

The article proposes the periodization of Gavriil Derzhavin’s poetry based on the evolution of his metrics. Accordingly, the periodization would be as follows: I. 1762–1778; II. 1779–1790; III. 1791–1816. Derzhavin’s poetry written from 1762 to 1790 demonstrates a rather limited set of meters — mostly iambic (iambic tetrameters, аlexandrines, free iambic verse); the presence of trochees (exclusively tetrameters) is modest, and ternary meters are completely absent. 1791 was a turning point. In that year Derzhavin published his polymetric cantata “To a Patron of the Arts,” which, though predominantly iambic, contains two dactylic and two trochaic passages. After that year he often used iambic trimeter as well as trochaic tetrameter, which was inspired by his rather late passion for anacreontics. Derzhavin’s turn to tonic folk verse has gone unnoticed until now. In the song “Fate has decreed that I must part…” from the early 1770s, which was not published until the 20th century, one finds a compilation of meters popular in folk poetry: pentasyllabic feet with fixed stress on the third syllable of each foot (lines 1–4) and dolniks (lines 5–24). Another example of the use of tonic verse combined with the same pentasyllabic feet is the poem “On the death of Katerina Yakovlevna, which occurred on July 15, 1795” (first published in 1933), in which Derzhavin imitated lamentations that are widespread in northern Russia. As the first collection of authentic bylinas, Kirsha Danilov’s “Ancient Russian poems,” published in 1804, awakened great interest in bylinas (oral ancient heroic songs) and their tonic verse. It also introduced wider possibilities for applying various kinds of folk meters to the new Russian poetry. Derzhavin was among the first to take advantage of these ideas. In his comic opera “Dobrynya,” some choruses are written in the same tonic verse as bylinas.

The paper examines the development of indefinite pronouns in Russian and Nivkh. The grammaticalization of the Nivkh verb ‘to be (like this), to do (like this)’ has led to the emergence of the particle hagin, which serves as a quantifier denoting free-choice and functioning as a negative polarity item. These meanings frequently coincide across languages, but their sources may vary. Questions arise regarding why distinct forms perform identical functions in different languages and what their origins might be. Another issue concerns the status of forms that yield these new grammatical meanings in Nivkh. To address these issues, our research reconstructs the grammaticalization process for these forms based on the analysis of Nivkh texts. We aim at establishing the semantic and syntactic grounds facilitating the grammaticalization scenario for these forms and introduce the idea of parallel development. It suggests that novel units undergoing grammaticalization activate a new pattern in the language community. These emerging patterns make the grammaticalization of additional lexical and grammatical material in the same function easier. In such a way, a new “structural flow” is created, and it gets consistently filled up with more and more material resulting in the grammaticalization output with the same functions.